CNY is the most important festive season of the year for the Chinese. It is during this time of the year, members of the family get together to celebrate the Lunar New Year. It is also during this time of the year those working and living in other parts of China travel back to their respective home towns to visit their families. To many, CNY is probably the only time of the year they will see their family and friends at home.
Why 2 weeks? Firstly, some of the migrant workers have to travel a long distance to get back to their home town, some times it take days to reach their village. Secondly, the amount of people traveling during this period is incredible, it is dubbed as the "Biggest Annual Human Migration of The World". So, the 14 days is to make sure people will stagger their traveling schedule and not to overwhelm (which is still unavoidable) the transportation system.
Here are some interesting articles for your reading:
Estimated at 3.2 billion trips! To put it into perspective, that's an average of 107 trips for the ENTIRE population (assume 30 millions) of Canada! That's 107 trips for everyone in Canada for the 2 weeks!
Trust me, it's very big a deal. There are some Chinese who don't really celebrate it as well (some Chinese who are more westernised or don't have that many contacts/relatives/friends), so for them it's just a "stay at home and rot" kind of holiday. New clothes, new underwear, new socks, new bedsheet, you clean the whole house which is called spring cleaning, in the streets you do rounding and the kids use snow sprays/water guns to round, visiting of relatives, drink and be merry etc....etc
Actually it lasts for 14 days, and 1st day is 23rd Jan.
Thanks for explaining that, I did not understand until I read what you wrote regarding context of migrant workers...and your large populace and country.
Thanks again for explain it to me in a nice way, because in Canada its not really the same way so I just didnt know.
Happy 2012 for you and your family, health and success, best wishes in the New Year!
Hi friends, indeed our New Year vacation is from Jan 21th to Jan 28th, almost 10 days, many worker will go home for celebrate the New Year, but our CS will still go on their work. But I will try my best to come here and do my BLF daily work.
I've been clicking "Refresh" on the new products page all day and finally realized it's CNY and that my efforts were in vain. I'm just glad that my outstanding orders had aleady shipped and should nearly be here now!
On the other hand, this means that my communication with Jim @ MF to try and straighten out an order where I was shipped the wrong product will be delayed by a couple of extra weeks. I've been working with MF Customer Service since late December and still haven't had the issue resolved.